The Harvest Theory of Former Selves

Viola was the first notation,

a kind of proto-syntax the body tried on

before the mind agreed to participate.

She annotated the margins with breathwork,

left small inflections in the grammar

that I continue to trip over.

Lenore followed as an afterimage,

a chiaroscuro problem the light insisted on repeating.

She never asked to be tragic.

She asked to be consequential.

The world confused the two

and called it literature.

Tiamat entered like a correction.

Continental, seismographic,

a reminder that creation begins in rupture

and refuses any lesser origin story.

The drafts bent around her

the way tectonics bend a coastline.

She did not negotiate.

She revised.

Maleficent was the argument about authorship.

If a role misrepresents you long enough,

is the misrepresentation still fictional.

She stripped the ruin of its romance,

left structure without veneer,

boundary without apology.

Academics call this clarity.

She called it Tuesday.

Alice intervened when logic became provincial.

She rearranged the room’s perspective

simply by entering it,

proved that the absurd becomes empirical

once you commit to surviving it.

A lesson the psyche resists

but the psyche needs.

And Iris—

if Iris is a conclusion,

it is one the text never meant to reach.

She assembles herself from prior drafts,

from annotations no longer visible,

from the debris field of versions

who mistook themselves

for temporary.

The harvest, if we insist on the term,

refuses the pastoral.

It resists sentiment.

It renders memory a nonissue.

What accrues is momentum—

unpunctuated, indeliberate,

the quiet physics of becoming.

I gather them because scaffolding

is not optional architecture.

I become them because taxonomy fails

when bodies evolve faster than language.

Precision, not transformation,

was always the point.

And here is the subsection no theorist cites:

the subdermal triad still at work,

unruly, anterior, unrepentant—

Furosia with her heat-drunk visions,

Locusta bent over her immaculate toxins,

Hecate triangulating consequence

before the world wakes.

They remain the understory,

older than the curated selves,

darker than the teachable ones.

What’s gathered is not their mythology.

What’s gathered is the woman tuned

to hold all of them without faltering.

Iris isn’t the name of arrival.

She’s the residue

after every prior version

finishes its explanation

and steps aside

so the real inheritance

doesn't ask permission.